First, there are a few basic things to get out of the way:

Fully transparent – All of the lenses I make are going to be in the squidoo account here. Feel free to look at them, dissect them, use ideas from them, ask questions about them etc.

Fully accountable - As we progress, I’ll post regular income, traffic, and other updates to illustrate how far along we are. I will probably adapt the current ‘Earnings’ tab to reflect this new information since the current graph and info on there is a bit outdated and not applicable to my new focus.

Multiple Revenue sources – I am reserving the right to use other affiliate networks and programs in additions to the ones that Squidoo natively supports. However, any Amazon revenue will go through Squidoo’s modules (i.e. I won’t shortcut Squidoo’s share to get to the goal faster). I will make a point to try to pick affiliate programs that are easy to get into. If you are planning on following along, I would recommend signing up for Commission Junction and Pepperjam for starters. It’s free and both have a huge array of programs to choose from.

How to get the most out of following the Captain on this dangerous, monster-filled journey of the high Squidoo seas :

Subscribe to the RSS Feed - so you don’t miss any posts that can help you.

Ask Questions – If you don’t understand what I’m doing or why it’s working and you don’t say anything, I can’t help you. If you can’t find me in the chat room, just drop me a PM and i’ll get back to you. With any luck there may be any number of people hanging out in there willing to help out.

Participate – As time allows, I’m planning on holding several chat room webinars on different concepts, tricks, methods etc. These will be free, but I reserve the right to limit the number of attendees to keep things from getting out of control (100 people in a chat room makes any kind of discussion tough).

Actually do stuff – By far and away the people I’ve seen that are the most successful at anything in life, online or off, are those that are willing to actually put in some work. Build some lenses, then build some more. It’s the only way to learn what works and what doesn’t. I can help a bit with best practices, but at the end of the day, it’s up to you.

Next: The Quest Begins

This has caused some big time ripples as it is the latest in a string of moves by eBay that increasingly makes their affiliate program more and more hostile towards its own affiliates.

Along this line, HQ announced their new eBay policy today for lensmasters.

In a nutshell, no more adding your personal ebay links to squidoo lenses.

What does this mean for your options? I see a few:

Use Squidoo’s ebay modules – Easy, fast, and they have proven to convert over time. However, Squidoo keeps half the income (which is pretty fair imho).

Stop using eBay – Over the past few months I’ve begun transferring a lot of my sites and content away from using eBay as a prime revenue generation source. For such a large company, their policies have been remarkably inconsistent and prone to change.  When compared with the other affiliate behemoth, Amazon, I’m constantly surprised at how well Amazon executes its program and eBay flubs theirs. If the products you are reviewing or reccomending on your lens can’t be found on Amazon, I would strongly encourage you to take a look at some of the other networks like Commission Junction, Pepperjam, Linkshare, and the like. Often you can find great programs that promote very cool specialty items and give you a better commission on top!

All in all, look at this change as an opportunity to diversify your income streams, not as a death knell on your online efforts.

What thoughts do you folks have?

This is truly a shame as I find that lens labels are perhaps one of the most useful aspects of the dashboard. They easily allow you to slice and dice your lenses into smaller groups and let you track cool things like the traffic that a particular subset of lenses is receiving.

So, for those of you that don’t really use lens labelling, here’s 5 reasons to start:

1. Sort by affiliate program - Create a separate label for Commission Junction, Pepperjam, etc. and place lenses that use each program under that label.
2. Lens Cloud labels (see ‘What is a Lens Cloud?’)- Every ‘cloud’ I make has it’s own label. Sometimes, i even have labels for sub-clouds etc. This cuts wayyy down on fishing around for the right lens.
3. To-Do – When I’m sitting down for a session of lens editing I always begin by assigning all the lenses I want to work on to a ‘pending’ type label. As I complete what I hoped to do for each lens, I remove it from that label.
4. Lenses can have multiple labels!
5. Tracking Lensrank – During some months, I’ll label every lens I have in the top tier with one label and every lens in tier 2 with a second label. Then, I’ll check it every week to see which lenses are rising or falling. This is great for helping me pick out trends that are occuring within my lenses.

As a special follow up treat, if you can’t seem to watch the videos in your browser for whatever reason you can download a zip file of the CJ-Squidoo Training. (it’s about 35 MB so it takes a bit)

As a quick re-cap, here are all the lessons we’ve learned in the past few days:

An Introduction to Commission Junction

Applying for Programs on Commission Junction

Adding affiliate products to your Squidoo Lens

Using Commission Junction’s reporting tools for maximum benefit

Remember, this training is really only a blueprint illustrating one way you can use an affiliate program on Squidoo. Most of the concepts translate pretty easily across all the major networks as well, the reporting and application process is usually quite similar.

I hope you all enjoyed it and stay tuned for some more fun posts this week!

I’m a huge believer in analytics and collecting as much actionable data as possible from my web properties. CJ lets you do that in a way that is very powerful once you learn how to use it.

Commission Junction Reporting Tutorials:

Performance Reporting with Commission Junction

Transaction Reporting with Commission Junction

If you are catching this series for the first time, make sure and check out the earlier videos so you’ll have an idea what I’m talking about here :

Introduction to CJ and Squidoo

Applying for an Affiliate Program on Commission Junction

Adding Commission Junction Links to Squidoo Lenses

Tomorrow, I’ll wrap up the series with a few special downloads for you guys so stay tuned!

The video covers how to insert products, descriptions, and images into your lenses in an SEO-friendly manner.

The video tutorial can be found here:

Adding Commission Junction Products to Squidoo lenses - CJ training Part 3

Also make sure and check out the first two posts in the series:

An Introduction to using CJ and Squidoo

Applying for Affiliate Programs on Commission Junction

you must be accepted as an affiliate by a company before you can begin earning money from them. The second installment walks you through applying for an affiliate program and provides some helpful tips for getting your application approved quickly.

Here’s the video:

How to Apply to Affiliate Programs on Commission Junction -CJ training part 2

And in case you are just joining us, the first post in the series can be found here:

Using CJ and Squidoo to make $1,000 a month

In a nutshell, they tell you how to build a kick butt affiliate lens using a third party affiliate program like Commission Junction. It’s close to 2 hours long all together and covers everything from how to apply to programs (and get into ones most people can’t) all the way to tracking sales down to the lens.

This is pretty much the blueprint I used to go from $10 or so a month on Squidoo to breaking $1,000 a month.

I Reached that level a while ago and have started using some other strategies since then in addition to these but I think you guys and gals will really find this series helpful.

Disclaimer: I recorded this video in 2008 so some of the screenshots are a bit outdated. The concepts are still perfectly valid though.

I’ll release the entire series over the next few days, here’s the first one, let me know what you guys think!

Commission Junction Training Video Overview -  Video 1

1) Ebay launched its own affiliate network to bring their affiliate program ‘in house’.

2) Many of the ebay affiliates have been complaining ever since then (April 1) that their conversion rate is lower. (Of course, I doubt that any affiliates that are making more money with EPN are talking much.. so it’s a one-sided conversation).

3) This weekend PepperJam announced that they are going to partner with eBay to help manage their affiliate program.

What this means:

The Pepperjam program has higher commisions which is exceptionally cool.  Unfortunately, I haven’t seen any mention of how or if the RSS or other API functionality of the listings will be able to be transferred over to the Pepperjam side or if that will remain in EPN’s court. I’m actually quite surprised that I haven’t seen this addressed anywhere as most people usually use ebay to promote specific items and there are currently only banners and text links with no deep links allowed.

Granted, it’s monday morning at 6am two days after the announcement, I might be getting ahead of myself a little bit here .

Pepperjam’s commissions on ebay fees starts at 52.5% of FVFs and $26.00 for new sign ups. I’ve also seen Kris Jones (the owner) mention in a few forums that if the volume you can drive is high enough you might even be able to squeeze just a bit more out of them (Think 5k a month plus at a bare minimum I would say)

The Verdict: I think this move is pretty painful for Commission Junction, a sign that eBay doesn’t know what it wants (what’s new?), and it really puts PepperJam in the driver seat on this deal.

Nice Job Kris, way to go on landing that whale.

If you want to take a look at the new program, head over to Pepperjam and sign up. If you have trouble getting accepted let me know and I’ll talk to my affiliate manager.

How does PepperJam stack up?

All of the graphics and interface on the entire program continually blow me away. It’s fast, easy to use, and well presented. The black background takes some people a while to get used to, but I actually enjoy a darker background color in many cases.

Grade: A

I notice that clicks and impressions are reported within 2-3 hours very consistently. This is faster than the likes of CJ, but not quite real time. However, I have not had any stats changed or revised either, meaning the reporting is pretty spot on. Real time reporting would be really cool, but this is hard to pull off with product based advertisers I think.

Grade: B+

Pepperjam opened with something around 100 offers (someone correct me if I’m way off here) and I think they’ve added something like 150 new advertisers since they opened. While not adding advertisers at a rate of 3-5 a day like CJ is, Pepperjam is coming close. There is a very high percentage of exclusive offers, with everything from the Star Wars store to Jelly Belly. They’ve got some very niche products which are cool.

One big drawback is that they have a ton of product based affiliates yet their product feeds leave a little to be desired (get to that in a second). Some affiliates do allow deep linking (where you link to any page on the advertiser’s site) which allows for some cool ideas when building lenses to promote things…

Grade: B

I’d say less than 20% of the product based affiliates (those that payout as a % of sale) have product feeds on PepperJam. The feed can only be downloaded as a gigantic CSV file instead of by individual advertiser. Many of the product feeds have broken image links. This is probably the weakest part of Pepperjam’s platform and I know it’s something they are planning on improving. Right now, however, it’s hard to use because the data is spotty at best and from limited affiliates.

Grade:C

PepperJam has a little talk bubble next to each advertiser that lights up whenever the affiliate manager for that program is online. I’ve used this several times to ask questions about payouts, ideas, and lots of other things. It’s absolutely fantastic! I’ve also had nearly all of my direct e-mails returned promptly with personal responses from people that can actually answer my question. This actually let me to come back to PepperJam a bit after not doing much with it the first month.

Grade: A

Every program I’ve seen migrate over from Commission Junction to PepperJam has increased their payout by close to 50% or more. In general, their payouts are pretty high, and if you talk to the affiliate managers and tell them about your marketing plans for the advertiser, you may be able to get a little bump. They’ve been very generous so far with increasing payouts on may account for advertisers I do well with.

I haven’t received a bank transfer from PepperJam yet so I can’t comment on that area of the payout cycle.

Grade: A-

Depending on a few different things, PepperJam could very well evolve to be a bigger part of my affiliate program strategy than Commission Junction currently is. If you haven’t signed up for them yet, they are worth giving a try.

Here is my super sneaky PepperJam sign-up link.

If you have already signed up, what have your experiences been so far? I’m interested to hear from others who have been using PepperJam the last few months.